Abstract:
This study examines the effect of linguistic and extralinguistic factorson
the variable deletion of the French pre-verbal particle ‘ne’ and the variable use of
‘on’ as a first person plural pronoun in the oral discourse offinal year students of
French. The instruments for data collection used were questionnaires and
interviews. The questionnaires were used to collect demographic information
about the respondents while the interviews, which bothered on daily issues, were
designed to elicit the use of the variables under study. Thirty final year students of
the Department of French, comprising immersion students and students who were
not part of the immersion programme were interviewed and recorded and the
transcribed data was analysed using the variationist probabilistic approach. The
analysis revealed that while the type of grammatical subject and the syntactic
structure of the verb following the pre-verbal particle ‘ne’ have strong influences
on the omission of ‘ne’ for the two groups of students, the phonological segment
of the verb has a marginal influence on the deletion of the particle. With respect
to the variable use of the pronoun ‘on’, the analysis showed that an unspecific and
unrestricted group of referents favoured the use of the pronoun among the French
Immersion students. Sex and age of the students, as extralinguistic variables, were
found to be major determinants of variant choice. Also, the first language of the
student had a significant influence on their use of the variants under study. It was
recommended, among other things, that apart from promoting immersion
programmes, the teaching of the French language should adopt an explicit
approach on linguistic variation.
